Secure Communities: Turning a Blind Eye

On Nov. 2, Acting Executive Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Secure Communities Program, Marc Rapp, alleged in a letter to the New York Times that the program “doesn’t racially profile.” This conclusion misses the point. Rapp’s myopic assessment of the Secure Communities Program fails to account for racial profiling that occurs before individuals are booked and turns a blind eye to local law enforcement misbehavior.

Through the Secure Communities Program, local law enforcement can run a person’s biometric data obtained at booking against Department of Homeland Security databases. If it gets a “hit,” these men and women can be processed for deportation, regardless of whether they have been convicted of a crime. Additionally, if the individual is identified as removable at the time of booking, for example because of his or her immigration status, an immigration hold is automatically placed and removal proceedings initiated regardless of whether the arresting charges are dropped. By giving local law enforcement these powers, Secure Communities tacitly permits or even encourages racial profiling by its manner of operation. Although Rapp would like to claim otherwise, the proof is in the numbers.

While the stated purpose of Secure Communities is to target serious, termed “Level 1,” criminal offenders, the reality is that the program nets far greater numbers of people arrested for minor offenses, like traffic violations. Of the 100,775 individuals identified through Secure Communities since its inception, roughly 86 percent were arrested for low level offenses such as driving without a permit.

Because ICE does not limit the program’s resources to focus on convictions for serious crimes before subjecting the individual to immigration screening, Secure Communities in effect creates incentives for the use of racial profiling and pretextual arrest. Yet, ICE has done nothing to reduce this incentive, despite the fact that the program’s Congressional mandate is to target serious criminals. Nor has ICE instituted any measures to monitor alleged racial profiling. While ICE claims to rely on individual complaints for this purpose, ICE has not established a basic complaint procedure.  Documented racial profiling by police in other ICE programs such as 287(g) makes clear that ICE can’t simply pretend away profiling that delivers people who look or sound foreign to the Secure Communities doorstep.

Given the numbers, it is hard to take seriously Rapp’s alleged commitment to or success in targeting individuals who have committed “horrible crimes.” At the very least, the current operation of Secure Communities turns a blind eye to allegations of racial profiling.

Melissa Keaney
Loyola Public Interest Fellow
National Immigration Law Center